The Future of AI Is Being Built in a Texas Cattle Town

Why Abilene, TX, and not Silicon Valley, is the future of AI

This is the first post in a two-part, paid series about how AI is eating the electrical grid. Today: Abilene, Texas. Tomorrow: how ERCOT is scrambling to keep up.

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Let’s Set the Scene

If you want to know where AI is really happening, stop looking at Silicon Valley. Look at Abilene, Texas. It’s a town in west Texas¹ with more cattle than coders. And it’s where the global substrate of machine intelligence is quietly being poured in concrete and copper.

Why Abilene? Because it has the three things that matter in AI: land, power, and silence. Not pitch decks. Not founders. Not sentiment. Just the stuff that moves electrons at scale.

Abilene, TX is due west of Fort Worth, TX. Screenshot sourced from Google Maps.

This post unpacks why OpenAI’s $500B Stargate Project chose Abilene as its anchor, why Crusoe and Oracle are pouring gigawatts into West Texas, and why private power is eating the grid from the bottom up.

AND FOR INVESTORS:

I’ve started seeing a wave of PE land deals betting on AI datacenters outside of Texas. These investors are making a fundamental mistake. They don’t understand the tempo of this market, or the jurisdictional gatekeeping that defines who gets to play.

If want to understand where the puck is really going in AI: ignore the hot new model strutting its stuff down the digital catwalk. Gawk at the megawatts.

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